User Persona: Developing a Website Visitor Profile
This blog entry was posted on March 3, 2009.
A user profile or a user persona is a fictional representation of your actual target audience. They are created as a real character to visualize how actual visitors to your website will react and make decisions. User personas illustrate the goals and behaviors of a real group of users.
Before starting any web project, you will want to understand your target audience. User personas put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about your customers. It is much easier to visualize your audience if you convert your demographic data and user behaviors into actual characters with names, ages, job information and even photos.
Defining a user persona helps the web development team have a shared understanding of real website users. Data is put into context and the website visitor is transformed from a set of numbers to a person with needs and feelings. They allow the web developers to live and breathe the web visitor’s world.
What should you include in developing a user persona? Start by giving them a name and a face (photo). Describe them with an occupation, age, gender, education background, web experience and how they use the web in work and personal times. Will hobbies or lifestyle affect what they need? What are their desires, urgency and expectations? How will they use the website? Are they timid or bold?
The user profile should be used to develop a picture of how a visitor will interact with the website. What pages to include, which features and even how to write your website copy. Generally you will need 2-4 user personas to describe your target audience; each with different characteristics and needs.
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- Getting Your Website Visitor to Take Action
- Your Online Persona
- Building Visitor Traffic
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Filed under: Internet Marketing,Website Design
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 5:33 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.3 Comments
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I have to second your opinion. Also by using a good web analytics package we could pinpoint the user persona.
Comment by Web Company — March 3, 2009 @ 9:48 am
[...] User needs, and Strategies for addressing those needs Web User Profile – User Persona User Persona: Developing a Website Visitor Profile [...]
Pingback by » Web Development Process & Instructions Leng — April 25, 2009 @ 11:47 pm
Thanks for your information, keep up the good work.
Comment by lowell — October 3, 2009 @ 4:45 am